Andy Mauro is the CEO of Automat which he co-founded in 2016. Its solution creates personalized shopping experiences for eCommerce that learns the needs of customers through a conversational interaction that then returns better product recommendations and higher conversion rates. The AI part of the solution starts by ingesting a product catalog and labeling the content to help drive better understanding about how the products fulfill needs beyond categories and specifications. It complements this with a conversational chat interface that can interact with shoppers and surface the appropriate product catalog item based on their needs. Notably, prior to founding Automat, Andy was senior director of Nuance's Innovations Group and the product manager for Nuance's custom voice assistant Nina, launched in 2014. He spent over 15 years at Nuance and witnessed its key growth era firsthand. Andy dissects the custom voice assistant market's origins and status today which is a nice launching point for discussing Automat and the company's strategy around e-commerce.